Brown at 60: Segregation's Suburban Legacy

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If you think school segregation ended in 1954 with the
Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board
of Education, look no further than Nassau County, Long Island, to learn
otherwise.

Nassau County’s non-Hispanic white population share declined
from 92 percent in 1980 to 69 percent in 2008. Yet an index of school
racial/ethnic segregation calculated by Teachers College researchers has barely
budged in the county since 1988. And while most of the county’s white and Asian
students land in well-to-do districts, the rest cluster in ones that are much
poorer, where their educational and life prospects suffer.

“It’s a stark reality: blacks and Hispanics are concentrated
in high-poverty schools,” said TC Trustee Nancy Rauch Douzinas, opening a
conference on racial diversity in suburban schools held at TC to mark the 60th
anniversary of the landmark Brown
ruling. The event was hosted by TC's Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis (EPSA).

The Rauch Foundation, which Douzinas leads and which
co-sponsored the event, focuses on Long Island. But the conference – like the
problem – is national in scope. “Schools remain frustratingly segregated,” said
TC President Susan Fuhrman. “Economic, political, social and cultural divides
have undermined our best intentions.”

“The system of spatial and social exclusion is maddeningly effective,”
said keynote speaker Xavier de Souza Briggs (Ph.D. ’96), Vice President at the
Ford Foundation, citing drivers such as housing policy, district size, funding
systems and litigation.

The Brown decision
launched desegregation, but the 1970s shaped its implementation. The busing win
in Boston “seemed like a good step forward, but after 1980 it all stopped,”
said Brown University sociologist John Logan. In between, the Supreme Court, in
San Antonio Independent School District
v. Rodriguez (1973), upheld the funding of schools via local property taxes.
In Milliken v. Bradley (1974) the
Court overturned a cross-district plan to address segregation at the regional
level after white flight from Detroit.

At the most fundamental level, the fight over the racial
makeup of schools has been “a clash between two principles: anti-discrimination
and local control,” said TC’s Michael Rebell, Professor of Law and Educational
Practice. Localism triumphed, significantly narrowing the choice of policies.
“It became impossible to overwhelm the political and cultural barriers,” said
Jeannie Oakes, Director of the Ford Foundation’s Educational Opportunity and
Scholarship programs. “Even the most elegant student assignment plans were not
enough to change the norms and political activity that perpetuated segregation
and inequality.”

Instead, housing patterns have remained the chief
determinant of school population. These patterns, driven by credit availability
and real estate practices, promote re-segregation. “Housing, mortgage
discrimination, and steering are rampant,” said Myron Orfield, Professor of Law and Director, Institute on
Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School. He
added that affordable housing development using federal low-income housing tax
credits disproportionately occurs in “segregated and unstably integrated”
neighborhoods, compounding the problem.

The picture isn’t uniformly bleak. In Oak Park, outside
Chicago, a kind of reverse steering has helped anchor diversity, said Rob
Breymaier, Executive Director of Oak Park Regional Housing Center. The center helps
people find rentals in locations where they “sustain integration of the
community.” The town also has redrawn boundaries to ensure integrated schools.
Almost all-white in 1970, Oak Park is now 21 percent black, 7 percent Hispanic,
and 5 percent Asian, yet property values have boomed. “We’re a community that
lost white population and got richer,” Breymaier said. “It can happen.”

Still, Oak Park is the exception. Small suburban districts
are most vulnerable to re-segregation, said TC’s Amy Stuart Wells, Professor of
Sociology and Education. Hyper-fragmented Nassau County, for example, spreads
200,000 students across 56 school districts. Research by Wells and
TC colleague Doug Ready, Associate Professor of Education and Public
Policy, shows a 10 percent increase in one district’s black and Hispanic
enrollment leads to a 3 percent decrease in home values in immediately adjacent
areas of neighboring districts.

It makes sense that larger districts have more scope for
integration measures. In Wake County, N.C., the county-wide system has capped
the percentage of free-lunch recipients in each school, preventing clustering
of poor students who are mainly non-white. “When schools integrate on a
regional basis, it stops the tipping” into white flight, said Orfield.

In Connecticut, where the state Supreme Court in 1996 ruled
school district lines in the greater Hartford area to be discriminatory, a
remedy focused on inter-district magnet and charter schools has bred positive
results, said Susan Eaton, Research Director at the Charles Hamilton Houston
Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. As a result, many
suburban students happily attend high-performing schools in the city. Overall 41
precent of the region’s students are in “desegregated settings,” Eaton said.

Even diverse towns or large systems have problems with
integration within districts or at the school level. Many well-off communities face
lower achievement by black students, said Gloria Ladson-Billings, Kellner
Family Professor of Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison of
the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The 27 member districts of the Minority
Student Achievement Network (MSAN) set up to tackle this problem include such
desirable names as Evanston, Ill., and Shaker Heights, Ohio.

Ladson-Billings cited data that show that 80 percent of
black high-school graduates whose PSAT scores suggest they could succeed in AP
courses never enroll in any. “I run around and tell black folk to enroll their
kids in AP,” she said. “Also, we need to think about the social experience of
black students in these schools.” In Evanston it proved useful to group the
“smart black kids” together rather than have just one or two per class – even
though, she said, “it might seem like re-segregation.”

But many black and Hispanic students are in older suburbs
where white flight and job losses have damaged the fiscal base. “You have to
address the hand you’re dealt,” said Eileen Santiago, Principal of Thomas
Edison Elementary School in Port Chester, N.Y. Her team employs a
community-school strategy aimed at “meeting all the developmental needs” of
students, including health, emotional needs, and parental engagement, to serve
an 84 percent Hispanic student body, many from undocumented families.

Sixty years after Brown,
the range of settings and dynamics that sustain de facto school segregation
make this a vexing problem for which some solutions seem out of reach. “We have
to do away with the local property tax base for school funding,” said Rebell.
“Until then, not much change can happen.”

Yet the conference heard encouragement as well. For one
thing, not only demographics but also attitudes are changing; the population
under age 35 is only 55 percent white and is very tolerant of racial diversity,
said Traci Burch, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern
University. Although activists must fight on multiple fronts, Briggs of the
Ford Foundation said “a new generation of efforts” is spreading, “acting
regionally, and at the grassroots.”

Rather than top-down reform, progress will come from below
fueled by ideas that work across new and creative coalitions. “Think and act
across the old silos,” Briggs said. “Things are moving; they can move.”